Sunday, March 22, 2015

Week 2: Convert The Sun

One thing that should be immediately clear by now is that I like contrasting colors and clean geometric shapes. It's probably just how my brain works. A lot of my game ideas tend to involve spheres, for instance. This week's game definitely does:

I wasn't certain what I wanted to make when I started making this. I knew I wanted to use bfxr to make some sound effects to use, and my initial idea was to make the game an exploration game, where you traveled along a small planetoid listening to different alien animals and identifying each one by its call... But while trying to figure out how to move about a small planetoid, I happened upon a gliding style of movement using the RotateAround method. With some trail renderers, and the ability to spawn a bunch more orbiting "pucks" you get something like this:

And I thought that was mighty cool, so I ditched the original idea and made the game about this little blue puck gliding about a bright yellowish planet shooting out more blue pucks. This was almost fun on its own, but I decided it'd be interesting if you had to worry about getting hit by other gliding pucks. I thought these could be red, but visually that was a pretty bad idea. So I kept the enemy squares yellow, to simplify things. At this point, the object of the game became clear: it's blue vs yellow. You have to eliminate the yellow to win. If you don't, the yellow will eliminate you.

A very simple game, really, but I got to brush up on my delegates, and use some sound effects I made with bfxr. I also had to deal with a lot of positioning headaches due to, again, a very simple game taking place in a somewhat complex arena. Oh, and speaking of sound, the menu music is by Alexandr Zhelanov, and the in-game music is by cynicmusic. Both files were used under this license.

I could have put a limit on the rate at which you can fire off pucks, which would have made the game much more intense, but I didn't. It's a very easy, calm-feeling game (with not-so-calm menu music, but it works). I feel like players can make the game intense on their own if they want.